lördag 19 september 2015

Nya varianter på Hitlers idéer?

Syrisk demonstration i Birmingham. Foto: Astrid Nydahl

When mass killing is on the way, it
won’t announce itself in the language we are familiar with. The Nazi scenario
of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal
elements have already begun to assemble.

Before he fired the shot, the
Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, “You must
die so that we can live.” As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized
the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us.

Today we think of the Nazi Final
Solution as some dark apex of high technology. It was in fact the killing of
human beings at close range during a war for resources. The war that brought
Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany
needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and
that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program.

The Holocaust may seem a distant
horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our
own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while
contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s
ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations
or maintaining a rising standard of living.